Fremont School is a tall, symmetrical red-brick school in the Renaissance Revival style, unusual for ornament worked almost entirely in matching red terra cotta rather than pale stone. A monumental central frontispiece rises to a classical pediment carrying the date 1896, above a row of round-arched windows and a huge semicircular entrance arch framed by a terra-cotta archivolt of egg-and-dart and dentils, its springing marked by ribboned-wreath medallions reading "18" and "96"; "Fremont" is incised in a terra-cotta band above. Engaged columns carry Ionic capitals centered on lion masks, a terra-cotta balustrade runs at the second floor, and scrolled terra-cotta brackets cap the flanking windows. A canted single-story bay projects at one corner.
The St. Louis Board of Education built Fremont School in 1896 in Benton Park; August H. Kirchner designed it. The school was named for John C. Frémont, the first Republican candidate for president — a pointed choice in a part of the city whose large German population had been strongly abolitionist. Like other St. Louis public schools after 1873, Fremont ran a kindergarten — the innovation Susan Blow had introduced to the city's public system — in a projecting ground-floor bay; a World's Fair-era class photograph, held by the Carondelet Historical Society, records one of its classes. The St. Louis Public Schools later closed the school, and the building was converted into senior apartments.
